Guardian
August 4, 2011
There's a word that is ubiquitous in the Greek capital: Enoikiazetai. For non-Greek speakers it might not be easy to pronounce but its meaning is bland, almost boring. It translates as "To let".
In today's Athens, it is as toxic and omnipresent as a plague notice stuck to the door. You will find it on shop fronts, office blocks and factories, where businesses have withered and died. Too many of them, and you know you're in an area where trade cannot prosper.
It is printed on white banners, strung across the windows of buildings 10 storeys high, and on cheap yellow paper signs plastered on the glass.
Inside one shop in a once busy commercial district, a banner is spread carefully across the floor, held down at its corners, visible only if you look through the window. On it is a telephone number. A few phone calls later, the failed history of the building starts to become clear.
The first call reveals that the premises used to be a doctor's surgery. Another call yields a firm of liquidators of failed insurance companies. The man who answers will not give his name but lists half a dozen companies that have gone under. His job, he says, is to rent out the building to help pay off the creditors; he has not managed to do that. George Fatoulis answers another call. He owns the building and once rented the ground floor to Toyota for a car showroom.
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